Over the last couple of months, I have done a deep dive into the world of Adobe Portfolio due to the amount of questions I had received on my TikTok about it. I’ve talked about some of the best themes to use, shared best-in-class Adobe Portfolio examples, discovered not-so familiar features, and whether or not it might be the right platform for you. I even put together a free mini-course that goes through the ins and outs of the platform.
After much hesitation and a lot of exploration, I now see why Adobe Portfolio can be such a valuable tool for young graphic designers and creatives. But does that mean it’s perfect? Hell no! Adobe Portfolio has a lot of ground to make up compared to other website/portfolio builder competitors in the market. But since it’s such a valuable tool for designers and creatives (cough cough Monopoly cough). I thought it would be a great idea to come up with some opportunities I see available for Adobe to make and improve the platform.
In this article, I’ll go through my top 10 improvement wishlist for Adobe Portfolio that I think would make this one of the best tools for building your design portfolio website. I cover everything from updating the overall platform to smaller more finder adjustments that would offer a lot of value for creatives while also bringing Adobe back into the spotlight.
I would love to hear what you think about my improvement wishlist so feel free to DM me on instagram or leave a comment on my TikTok page. And if you want to learn more about upgrading your portfolio using the best tools and methods then subscribe to my newsletter The Portfolio Squeeze where we focus on how you can have fruitful and lucrative career starting with your portfolio website.
1. Revamped Menu/Interface
Currently, Adobe Portfolio’s menu and how you navigate around your portfolio website is stuck in the past. It utilizes a left sidebar with a maze of dropdowns that tends to hide more features than a hospital gown. Some of the most helpful features that Adobe Portfolio currently offers are hidden in this thing just waiting to be discovered. This is my first wishlist item because I see this as one of the most important. I can’t tell you how puzzled I was with the influx of questions I received on TikTok. It was as if the ‘simple and easy portfolio builder’ had stumped everyone. If Adobe made only one thing come true out of my whole wishlist. This would be it.
2. New Portfolio Themes
However, if Adobe made two things come true from my wishlist. New and updated theme templates would be the second! I believe Adobe Portfolio was released by Adobe in 2015 or 2016 and you can tell by the existing portfolio templates. From the spacing of elements to the homepage layouts, these templates were launched during an older era of web design. The lack of updated themes I think has more of an effect on young graphic designers and creatives than most might think. Encouraging the use of these outdated themes, especially coming from our creative software overload Adobe, only enforces the idea that these layouts are acceptable outside of a design portfolio setting. New portfolio themes would not only help graphic designers look good but also help keep them up-to-date on the latest web design trends within the market.
3. Robust Video Player
Did you know that you can add videos from YouTube or Vimeo to your Adobe Portfolio website? I didn’t at first but found it to be almost helpful. While Adobe Portfolio comes with its own video player that has a limited feature set. You can also use a code embed to import videos from YouTube and Vimeo. This however is very limited as the one thing that currently drives a stake through my heart is that when you add one of these embedded code blocks, there is no ability to adjust the sizing of the video player. This means that your video may look good on desktop devices but disproportionate on smaller devices as the aspect ratio does not scale.
Switching back over to the stock video player Adobe Portfolio offers. Unfortunately, Adobe has not updated this element to include features such as the ability to autoplay or hide the play controls. How many times can you actually remember pressing the play button on a recently visited website versus the video playing as soon as it loads or comes into view? Probably less than twice. This might sound like a small little update but in my opinion, a small change like this could do a lot for your portfolio website. It might just be the difference between getting hired and getting passed over.
4. Prioritized Style Guide Process
I am a big Big BIG advocate when it comes to defining a style guide for a design project or website. That’s probably because that’s the only thing I did in some of my early jobs as a product designer. But believe me, it helps so much! Defining a style guide is one of the first steps I take, especially when it comes to web design. It ensures the development process runs smoothly. It also helps to make site-wide updates with one adjustment rather than going through multiple pages and making updates individually. I would love to see Adobe make setting a style guide somewhat of a priority in the onboarding process or give us a way to alter a style guide separate from the page design process.
5. Rich Media Elements
In addition to having a more robust video player, I think it would be also advantageous for Adobe to include some prebuilt rich media elements such as image carousels and slideshows. This would allow graphic designers and creatives to vary the way they present images on their portfolio websites as well as keep the attention of visitors.
While we’re talking about rich media elements, I want to also throw in that the current code embed block strips out certain styling within it. I know Adobe does this to avoid any harmful code that might break the platform, but it would be nice if they gave designers and creatives some ability to do custom-coded elements within these blocks. I haven’t tested out if you’re able to embed elements from other sites such as Mailchimp but hey, that would be nice to have in case you have a newsletter like I do for Creative Juice and The Portfolio Squeeze.
6. Improved Method of Adding Elements
While creating my Master Adobe Portfolio Mini Course I realized that adding new elements to a page was not as clear as it could be. When you want to create a new page you are presented with a card containing all the different types of elements you can add to a page but after that is used it disappears. To continue adding elements to build your page layout you then have to find that sweet spot between a previous element and next using a mouse hover. While it works, it’s not my favorite.
To improve this, and this suggestion levels back to having a revamped menu/interface, I would prefer to have a persistent menu displayed containing all the elements available to add to the page as I am building it.
7. Prebuilt Animations
It’s the beginning of 2024 at the of writing this article and the expectation bar for portfolio websites is going higher and higher. Designers are getting more creative and portfolio platforms are offering more features such as animations to elevate your portfolio presentation. This would be a huge upgrade for Adobe Portfolio and make it a competitor amongst the creative software market.
I want to be clear with this improvement though. I am not asking for complete control over every property of animation feature as I think that can sometimes be overwhelming for designers and creatives that are not familiar with web design standards. I think a better alternative would be to evaluate what are the most popular applications for animations and develop those into prebuilt drag and drop solutions that you can add to elements with your page. Perhaps later down the road you can release the ability to adjust the animations, but for now I think adding a level polish using prebuilt animations would be a huge value add for designers and creatives looking to build their portfolio websites in a quick and easy way.
8. Optimzed Image Formats
While Adobe Portfolio offers the ability to use JPG, PNG, and GIF formats. I personally have switched over to using WebP any opportunity I get to optimize my website’s page load time. This may sound like a small improvement but having the ability to use a contemporary image format like WebP could help a lot of designers that are using larger sized images and want to retain the resolution and level of detail while showing off their projects.
9. Mobile Device Customization
One of the simple beauties of Adobe Portfolio is the limited amount of customization you have available when it comes to updating the design of your portfolio website for various devices. I am all about taking as much stress off the plate of any designer or creative that is using the platform to build their portfolio website and would like to keep this feature somewhat together. However, in it’s current state it’s not exactly perfect and plenty of room for improvement.
Again, this improvement levels back to another wishlist item which is prioritizing the process of setting a style guide in the beginning of your portfolio website design. But as you come to the end of developing your new portfolio website, I would love for the ability to be able to slightly alter or change some aspects of the mobile views. Not only on mobile devices but also for tablets and smaller screens. It doesn’t have to be anything major but perhaps at first, the ability to change properties like color or sizing would be a good start. Then later on there could be adjustments available to layouts. For example to set images into a two column grid.
10. Templated Page Layouts
My final wishlist item for Adobe Portfolio item might be something that I haven’t seen a lot of portfolio website builders employ. And maybe that’s because it’s a bad idea, but I think having somewhat templated or predefined page layouts could be an interesting feature to test.
Think about, graphic designers and creatives work on a variety of project types that we are all familiar with. For example, a graphic designer may work on branding type projects or website design type projects. As a community of professional creatives, we know somewhat what should be included in these types of projects no matter what. Defining these ‘properties’ we’ll call it, and developing templated page layouts with these project types in mind can give graphic designers and creatives generous headstarts when it comes to adding new work and keeping their portfolio websites updated. Not to mention it would continue alleviate the frustrating process of sitting down and thinking real hard about the layout design of a new project because at the end of the day, I believe the content and quality of work is more important.
Conclusion
While Adobe Portfolio is definitely one of the most popular portfolio website building tools in the market amongst graphic designers and creatives. It definitely has a lot of room for improvement to make even better. This article might be all for nothing but I’m sure if we all rallied behind this and continued to add more wishlist items we could bully Adobe into actually caring a little more about this portfolio website tool.
I would love to hear what you think about my wishlist and if you have any suggestions for items that can be added. You can always DM your suggestions on Instagram or leave a comment on one of my videos on TikTok.
And if you want to continue learning about how to make your design portfolio website a powerful tool then consider subscribing to my newsletter, The Portfolio Squeeze. Once a month I take a deep dive into the art of tasteful portfolio websites and share some of the best from around the world and cover topics just like this. You can sign up using the link right here.
